A Family First Netflix

Conservative lobby group Family First have launched an online TV service for parents worried about exposing their children to offensive content.

The online streaming service, called “Family First TV”, allows families to rent or buy content with granular controls over who can see what. It also offers a large amount of political content from Family First for free.

Family First trumpet the granular parental controls as the main innovation within the service. The system is split into four separate five point scales – language, violence, sexual themes, and adult themes.

For example, a “1” on the sexual themes scale signifies an on-screen kiss or a partially naked character, while a “3” signified implied intercourse – such as a “morning after” scene.

Parents can create different profiles for children with fine tuned levels, and assign credits for them to rent or buy the content.

Spokesman Nick Hitchins argued that sticker ratings don’t give parents enough control over the content their children see.

“A PG can be anything from fantasy swordfighting in Puss in Boots through to teenagers kissing behind the bush through to people using some quite colourful language,” he said.

“Instantly,our insights panel gives families the ability to say ‘what is going to occur in this that might concern me’.”

Hitchins points to the M-rated Star Wars: The Force Awakens as an example of this imprecise rating.

“Parents are suddenly in a quandary. M in my mind suddenly feels like I would tell my kid they need to be sixteen before they can watch that. Now comes Star Wars which used to be pretty much PG all the way through.”

Michelle Baker from the Office of Film and Literature Classification said they were always happy for parents to look up extra information on films they wanted to show their children.

“We would like to put as much information as we can on the sticker, but there are some limitations on the physical label,” she said.

This is a good initiative from Family First. Empowering parents to be more specific as to what they deem suitable. The current classifications are very broad, and a voluntary system that provide more detailed ratings will I am sure be welcome by some parents.

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Comments (17)

Family First gets a bad rap, and one can debate until the cows come home over whether or not that is deserved. But kudos to them for actually doing something, rather than merely complaining about what others are doing.

Works well until their tech savvy kids just get content from somewhere else. I think the horse has bolted when it comes to controlling what your kids can see online – unless you are shoulder surfing what they are doing 24/7.

“McCoskrie & his rabid mates at Family First are invariably telling us how to bring up our own children”

It is John Key and previous governments that have done that.

It is John Key who promoted a law that makes it a criminal offense for a parent to smack a naughty toddler on the bum. Previous government have made it legal for schools to arrange abortions for girls under 16 without parents being notified.

If you want to give your children condoms that is your right but other people should not without your consent.

ross411

If they really wanted to make a difference, they’d create a public rating system and set of ratings, and require commercial services license the data. There could be demand for something like this, especially if parents could actually choose the “family first” rating system to apply to their kid’s account in Netflix or on Amazon or any similar service. And a decent set of ratings that allowed tight verified control, would be presumably useful and valuable.

But there are problems with that, like a requirement for competence that is easier to hide if you surround your ratings with a walled garden that you control and retain all profits from.

I expect family first to come up with some poor quality streaming system that is not very user friendly, with a minimal selection of content, and for their service to die with most users who tried it ending up disappointed. In the meantime, most people will sign up to Netflix or some other popular service and just make do.

eszett

The main point here is that Family First wants to do their own classifications. A huge undertaking, as someone has pointed out already, merely to tell parents what their kids can watch and what not.

The reason why they need to offer an online streaming service is to be able to recover the costs for the whole effort. Otherwise they could just publish their ratings and parents could choose on netflix or wherever what to show their children.

If this is what FF wants to sink their money into, it’s fine with me. It’s something people can choose to use or not and they are not forcing it on anyone.

mikenmild

There is no way that Family First will be able to source enough desirable content to build a popular service. Their only selling point is to the small number of people who want someone else (Family First) to decide what their children can watch AND who also wish to be bombarded with conservative Christian propaganda. So that’s about 10 families in New Zealand.

Dave Mann

Yes this will work perfectly because children and young teenagers have no way of accessing media from the real world. They don’t know how to turn on a TV and they haven’t heard of YouTube, Facebook or any of the other digital wickedness. Yep…. this is certainly a fine initiative.

burt

emmess

There is already a rating system on Netflix, multiple profiles can be set up. I have locked my TV down so my primary school age kids can view stuff recommended for only older kids and younger only by themselves.

laworder

The ratings data could well have a wider audience then they anticipated. For many people out there, a rating of 5 on the sexual themes scale would be a recommendation, not a warning, and that information is desirable on that basis. Perhaps they should look at offering the rating data to the wider public and monetising that somehow?

I’m a big fan of solid Christian morality, but there’s a vast difference between that and the sort of ridiculous puritanism that FF touts. People might take them a lot more seriously if they didn’t seem so opposed to anybody having any sort of fun.

Dexter

I actually think the teachings of Jesus are great, it’s the interpretation by some groups that is wanting. Unless you are going to shelter kids them from the world aka Gloriavale I really don’t see the point in shielding them from watching teenagers kissing or mild swearing and the like, because they are going to see and hear far worse in a school playground.

Although if this service also includes movies that show the latter, but gives parents prior warning, then it seems like a fairly decent thing.